Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java, C#, and C++, mostly.
Wait a minute, C# doesn't compile that long :)
There are these things called CI/CD and integration tests.
The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
151–160 of 208 posts
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
But humans generally like to organise things hierarchically and I would think database are not well suited for this purpose. That is, unless there exists some kind of tree structured database that I don't know about ... Many years ago Microsoft tried to implement some kind of database oriented file system (it was a big dream of Bill Gates IIRC and probably meant for Longhorn), but this project never became part of an…
> That is, unless there exists some kind of tree structured database that I don't know about ... Believe it or not, hierarchical databases were actually quite popular once upon a time, mostly in IBM mainframe land as I understand it. Today the Windows registry is a hierarchical database in common use.
And Codd's invention of RDBMS killed those very successfully... until we reinvented them , first with XML, second with NoSQL, and rediscovered, again, why the relational databases were such a huge success and adopted with such enthusiasm.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know realistically what Obj C uses in the osx cpu architecture but I'm almost certain it's not going to be as simple as just retargeting your compiler... Objective C is in mainline GCC. You retarget your compiler and port the runtime. As far as I know, any target with GCC support can run Objective C, given a runtime. The important parts of the runtime require kilobytes, not megabytes, of space. Remember tha…
GCC doesn't do modern Objective-C, only what they got from NeXT days.
> GCC doesn't do modern Objective-C, only what they got from NeXT days.
It's definitely a lot more than the NeXT days. GCC got fast enumeration, exceptions, garbage collection (if you really want it), synthesized properties, etc. These are the "Objective C 2.0" features which got released in 2007, back before Apple was shipping Clang.
GCC doesn't have ARC, array / dictionary literals, or other new features. But it's definitely a lot more than Objective C from the NeXT days. These are "modern" Objective C. They're also basically just sugar for the appropriate calls to +[NSArray arrayWithObjects:...] or -[retain] / -[release] etc.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#154Maybe this is a hot take, but it seems like browsers have essentially become what the operating system should have been, and it's the reason that everyone crams things into web apps / Electron instead of building native applications.
Browsers have a set of APIs that are decided on by a standards committee, and you have to implement those standards if you want your browser to be compliant. As an application developer, all I need to do is check a page to see how widely a standard has been adopted and then use it - I can be sure that my code can ship to (nearly) every device and behave uniformly, with minimal tweaking.
If the operating system had gone that route, we wouldn't have had to build more layers on top of it to abstract away the differences.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#155I can't help but think about what happened with graphics APIs - the older ones (DX9, OpenGL) held your hand more, and the new ones are super bare metal and not written for the faint of heart. I think most would agree this is better though; for an application developer you can simply use a much higher level library built on top, and for the library/engine developer you have a lot more power and control. The old APIs w…
>I think modern OS stacks are in a similar boat, at least Windows and macOS. I come from a background as a EEE mainly writing embedded code before somehow stumbling into frontend code (in win32, Cocoa and Qt) at my old job. From my experience, OS-Level APIs definitely have more in common with Electron or Qt than they do "bare metal". To make the top left pixel red on a bare metal system or RTOS, you simply write `fra…
Arguably win32 GUI or Cocoa are not "OS level" APIs; yes some aspects of them are invoked through syscall type interfaces (esp win32) but not consistently and the operating system itself is entirely usable without them. Especially Cocoa. You can boot a Mac into a BSD shell without ever running Finder and the GUI.
Writing into a framebuffer is arguably as much of an abstraction these days as many of these toolkits. In the modern world of GPUs and display controllers a framebuffer itself is already N levels away from the "physical" display hardware. We're not in VGA land anymore. Some aspects of the OS or the OS's interaction with the display driver may present something like a linear framebuffer to you, but underneath that is a world of GPU textures and buffers and display controller abstractions.
When I think of OS-level APIs I think of ioctl, mmap, file descriptors and sockets. I guess that's my Linux bias showing?
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there is a very blurry line between operating systems, programming languages, and we can include databases as well. Some operating systems as you point out are PLs. Some PLs are implemented as databases. They’re all just really complex accounting systems by nature. Look at the implementation of a lot of OSes, PLs and DBs they are really just made up of tables keeping track of relationships all the way down.
> Some operating systems as you point out are PLs None that immediately spring to my mind. There are operating systems that incorporate programming languages as their default user interface (like UNIX that drops into a Borne shell and LISP machines) and there are computers that have programming languages baked into their firmware (like the 70s and 80s micro computers did with BASIC). But in neither instance is the la…
For a Lisp Machine the operating system was written in the language itself, this included a network stack and the filesystem interface for local disks.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OS is all about resource sharing and allow a minimum common level of interoperability. Smalltalk can provide a storage abstraction, but to interoperate with other things it needs to be able to save data in a way that can be loaded back into your Java program. OSes can provide you with the desired abstraction level. You could stop at the block layer, which many DBs can take advantage of, but that won't help your J…
> Consider audio instead. OSS always provided pretty much all the hardware features, but allow no resource sharing. Every single evolution on that front has been an increase in complexity to allow for resource sharing. None of the API changes were required for resource sharing though so that complexity could (and should) have been contained to the implementation and those applications that actually need new features.
Which is actually the case. In fact, audio is the best examples where everything can plug into almost everything. padsp (if I'm not mistaken - not at the prompt right now) does just that.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#158Maybe this is a hot take, but it seems like browsers have essentially become what the operating system should have been, and it's the reason that everyone crams things into web apps / Electron instead of building native applications. Browsers have a set of APIs that are decided on by a standards committee, and you have to implement those standards if you want your browser to be compliant. As an application developer,…
From this perspective it makes sense why Chromebooks are doing so well, especially among general computer users.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#159"an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one" I've wondered the same thing about databases. Just like an OS, a database has to manage data on disk and figure out when to cache it. The files & folders metaphor is arguably a relic of pre-computer times--instead of searching through folders, it is easier to search and sort based on particular attributes, somethi…
You might be interested to read about IBM's OS/400, aka IBM i. It's... sort of like that. Essentially an OS built around DB/2.
Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some operating systems as you point out are PLs None that immediately spring to my mind. There are operating systems that incorporate programming languages as their default user interface (like UNIX that drops into a Borne shell and LISP machines) and there are computers that have programming languages baked into their firmware (like the 70s and 80s micro computers did with BASIC). But in neither instance is the la…
For a Lisp Machine the operating system was written in the language itself, this included a network stack and the filesystem interface for local disks.
The filesystem(s) and the disk driver(s) were written in Lisp, too.